Unfortunately, Saint Clair County doesn’t have a courthouse. I had hoped it would considering the one in Evansville, but I just had to content myself with a county building. For a few minutes, I didn’t think I had the right building, but the county ballot box was a pretty good indication that I was in the right place. I’m not sure it I considered ballot boxes long ago when I start designing courthouse identification metrics, but I’ve found them incredibly helpful over the last few years. That said, the county building was a little more than one would expect, not just one of the hideous architectural choices of the last fifty years that has profaned and desecrated this world. Once I was done with photography, my daughter and I went to grab a cache at one of her requested places to visit in the area …
… the Cahokia Mounds World Heritage Site. The site of the largest known site of Mississippian culture, the city (of which the site represents a small part) boasted a population of 15 to 20 thousand people a thousand years ago. Now it exists as archeological sites, echoes of a time before the post-Columbian invasion of North America. The first thing I wanted to do was find the Multi-cache close to the Interpretive Center, but the first stage was missing so that was a no-go. I went ahead and did the Earthcache that was there. Just between you and me, I can’t really imagine how an ancient habitation site would count for something geologic like that, but I’m not going to quibble. None of the other physical caches were close enough for our liking and we didn’t feel like tromping all over creation anyway. We already had a cache in the county at this point, so we went ahead and crossed the road, going back into Madison County, to climb Monks Mound. We were rewarded with a Virtual and an amazing view.
But I still had work to do.
The Illinois All County Challenge is not as liberal as Missouri’s, requiring all physical caches. I still needed one in Saint Clair County. Luckily, we found a simple one at an observation deck closer to the river, a keybox on some electrical equipment for a security camera (the irony!). It was good enough for government work. My daughter went back to the car and waited (she felt she had done enough walking for the day) while I went to the top of the deck and observed another view.
And it was quite a view. And from there we backtracked a little, crossed a bridge, and found ourselves in…
